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Re: Instructions for Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

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From: Bossley, Peter A.
Date: Jan 10, 2020 10:33PM


This came up when we were having a similar discussion at my institution about top-level menu items with both sub menus and pages themselves. Where I landed with this is that if a widget requires non-expected keyboard interaction patterns (for whatever reason) the information about that shortcut had to be available programmatically associated with the first control of that type and also visually present for keyboard reliant users.

Perhaps a strict interpretation of WCAG 2.0 might be argued, but on the other hand we specifically adopt expected interaction patterns from Aria Authoring Practices in our technical standard for this very reason.

Just my .02.



-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of glen walker
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2020 6:33 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Instructions for Custom Keyboard Shortcuts

John, thanks for pointing out that Deque's interpretation is
non-normative. That's an important point that is often overlooked.

In this scenario, if the *only* way to perform a certain action is via the
keyboard shortcut, then I'd say it's a failure of 3.3.2. The user has no
way to discover the shortcut.

However, if the same action can be accomplished via other means that are
accessible and discoverable, then not having instructions about the
keyboard shortcut might be more of a usability issue. If there's
documentation separate from the app itself (perhaps via a Help menu or
button) that explains the app's shortcut keys, I think that's sufficient.